The Aciabro are an offshoot of goblin-kind, kin to the Cogheads and shaped by the same lost craft, but turned to a darker fuel. Where a Coghead's grafts run on Aether drawn from the air, the Aciabro feed theirs on the blood already moving through the body. The augmentations are not bolted-on machinery. They are handmagic-cut into living flesh, brass and gut set into the body by a working that spends life the way all Deoric does, and a body so remade is formidable and never far from collapse, because every part it adds is one more mouth on the same blood.
They keep to secluded workshops thick with the smell of oil and hot copper, and there are never many of them. What they hold is not a craft anyone could learn from them. It is the remnant of an older and greater one, a fragment of the lost age's bodywork that came down their line and no one else's. They are driven to extend it, to cut and fit and bleed into the next addition, and they hold unaltered flesh in contempt as weak and wasteful. The drive has no natural stopping point.
The making
The Aciabro began with a working, not an accident. Somewhere in the brood's history a handmagician, working from the salvage of that lost craft, cut titan-bone into a brood-father and set a mechanism into the wound, a pump of metal and gut that ran on the blood already moving through him. Handmagic of that order does not refine a living thing so much as add a clause to it, and the clause copied with everything else the brood carries. The father chose his queen, the queen bore the next father, and the mechanism came down the line intact. What breeds true in the Aciabro is not the metal. It is the need for it. Every one of them is born with the loop one part short, an appetite to cut and fit and bleed into brass that no amount of building ever closes, and a body that will starve its own flesh to keep the machine fed.
Aspects
- Blood fuels the gear
- Invention over safety